Accelerate and Farmers' Gates

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Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim

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The kind of gate I’m talking about.

In the rural community where I grew up there was a common aphorism: “A good farmer has good gates” and generations of experience showed that this is a pretty good rule of thumb.

If you took a group of researchers and surveyed the local farmers’ general habits, including how well maintained their gates are, do you think they could infer a relation? Could they even predict which were the better farmers based on their gates? Yes they probably could, because a good farmer has good gates.

In the jargon, this is predictive inference, and it is the kind of inference that Accelerate describesIn chapter 12 they go into some detail. .

Does having good gates make you a good farmer? Of course not. The relation between gates and the type of farmer is not causal.

Can a farmer become a better farmer through better maintenance of his gates? Hmm. Accelerate might say that “good gates drive good farming”. IMO the word “drive” is bearing quite a lot of weight to make that statement.

The unfortunate situation is that predictive inference explains nothing. It may validate a hypothesis based on a theory but the scientific literature is littered with such validations that later turned out to be falseTry this website to demonstrate your political point. .

For explanation you need, at least, causal inference and that is much much harder. Causal inference requires a causal statistical model which is notoriously hard to get right.

My feeling is that some of the key indicators in Accelerate really are causal but others are just the equivalent of good gates.